Their essays were written from 2016 to 2023, when India's democratic institutions were subverted and caste-based oppression overflowed into public space-killing and menacing minorities, women, students, the media and lower castes of all religions.
This book chronicles the ascending oppression of democracy in India, a veritable biography of authoritarianism. Dwivedi and Mohan reject simplistic accounts of India's politics as the opposition between 'Hindu majoritarian nationalism' and 'the religious minorities', or between 'Hindu fundamentalism' and 'religious pluralism'. They propose instead a genuinely transformative account of Indian politics, grounded in political philosophy and in the lower-caste majority position.
What does revolution mean where the constitutional promise of equality is betrayed daily by the millennia-old inequality of caste? What does politics mean where religion serves as the justification for descent-based enslavement and indignity? Revolution has only one sense in India, the annihilation of caste; and 'citizen' has only one sense, the people of the state shedding caste and racism.
SHAJ MOHAN is a philosopher based in India, publishing on metaphysics, technology and history of philosophy. He is the co-author with Divya Dwivedi of Gandhi and Philosophy.
Mohan and Dwivedi are the most well-known philosophers of their generation and belong to the tradition or 'the bastard family' of deconstruction. They developed their philosophical contributions in the intimate friendships with Jean-Luc Nancy and Bernard Stiegler (it was Stiegler who, in fact, introduced me to them both many years ago), both of whom in turn were friends of the renowned inventor/discoverer of the project of deconstruction in the history of philosophy, Jacques Derrida, who used to refer to them as 'post-deconstructive' thinkers. That is how Dwivedi and Mohan have come to be known outside of India as the philosophical heirs to a tradition which begins at least from Husserl. When philosophers write about anything whatsoever their reflections are grounded in their philosophical intuitions and projects such that everything is philosophical.
Hindu (933)
Agriculture (118)
Ancient (1085)
Archaeology (754)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (911)
Biography (702)
Buddhist (544)
Cookery (167)
Emperor & Queen (565)
Islam (242)
Jainism (307)
Literary (896)
Mahatma Gandhi (373)
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